Bordering (.1: The Landscape)

29 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Economics in Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Maps, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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Anglo-Scots border, Black Middens Bastle, blackmail, Border Marches, Border Reivers, Border Wardens, Charlemagne, Debatable Lands, Emyn Beraid, Fairbairns, Hadrian's Wall, Hermitage Castle, hot trod, John Philip Sousa, Marca Hispanica, Marches, Monty Python, Offa's Dyke, Robert Carey, Scots Dike, Smailholm Tower, Ted Nasmith, The Liberty Bell, The Lord of the Rings, The Shire, Tolkien, Tower Hills, West March

Welcome once more, dear readers.

In this posting, we want to return to a recent one about “marches”—that is, not pieces for military bands (although we are partial to those of John Philip Sousa—1854-1932–

especially “The Liberty Bell”—1893—

digital.gonzaga.edu.jpeg

mostly because it was used by Monty Python. We provide a link here for what might have been its first recording, by the “Edison Grand Concert Band” in 1896. Watch out for the big foot!)

but border areas, usually sensitive ones, which might have been militarized, like that at the southern edge of Charlemagne’s empire.

This, the Marca Hispanica, existed as a buffer state between the Moorish Caliphate to its south and the Holy Roman Empire to the north.

In contrast, we have the West March, to the west of the Shire, as we’ve discussed before.

At its far western edge are the Tower Hills (here illustrated by one of our favorite Tolkien artists, Ted Nasmith)

on which are perched three white towers, described in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings:

“Three Elf-towers of immemorial age were still to be seen on the Tower Hills beyond the western marches. They shone far off in the moonlight. The tallest was furthest away, standing alone upon a green mound. The Hobbits of the Westfarthing said that one could see the Sea from the top of that tower; but no Hobbit had ever been known to climb it.” (Gandalf adds to this that there was a palantir, Elendil’s Stone, located there—The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 11, “The Palantir”.)

The difference is, those towers don’t seem defensive and the West March is not a military zone—although it is the site of Hobbit-expansion, as Appendix B tells us:

“1452 The Westmarch, from the Far Downs to the Tower Hills (Emyn Beraid) is added to the Shire by the gift of the King. Many hobbits remove to it.

1462 …the Thain makes Fastred Warden of Westmarch. Fastred and Elanor make their dwelling at Undertowers on the Tower Hills, where their descendants, the Fairbairns of the Towers, dwelt for many generations.”

Talk of marches and wardens and towers, however, immediately brought to mind for us something from our world (doesn’t it always?).

This is the border area between England and Scotland, an area of conflict for several centuries, but culminating in the struggles of the 16^th century.

The border area had been divided, on both sides, into three marches, with a subset for that area on the southwest side called the “Debatable Lands”, because both England and Scotland claimed it. In 1552, the decision was mutually made to put up an earthen barrier, the so-called “Scots Dike”, to split it.

Unlike Hadrian’s Wall, farther to the south, with its system of walls and towers and gates and little forts and big army camps, this was never an elaborate military structure, or even like Offa’s Dike between England and Wales,

but simply a boundary marker in low-lying land (and only 3.5 miles long– 5.6km).

When it came to the border towards the east, and the center of the region and beyond, however, the land rises into the characteristic twisty hills with long, narrow valleys.

14.PennineWay-CNN2NJ-1680x1050

In this wild world, there are no long walls, of stone, wood, or earth to protect anyone, but castles, towers, and fortified farmhouses called bastles (possibly from the same root as “Bastille”?). Here we see Hermitage Castle, Smailholm Tower, and Black Middens Bastle.

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Smailholm-tower1

Although we see these now as gaunt ruins, we should always imagine them—as in this reconstruction of Smailholm—as living spaces, as well as refuges in an often lawless land.

One has only to see the thick walls of a bastle and, originally, no door at ground level (stairs appear to be a later convenience for a more peaceable time), to imagine the danger from reivers, raiders from either side of the Anglo-Scots border and sometimes, as there was a certain amount of intermarriage, from both.

As can be seen in this reconstruction, these walls might be all that would stand between the inhabitants and destitution or even death, should the reivers come raiding.

There was also the possibility of buying them off, by paying them blackmail, a word whose origin is contested, but whose purpose is clear: protection money. If you paid them, in coin or cattle, you were safe—at least until the price went up.

Curbing such behavior was the job of the Border Wardens, there being six, one for each March on each side of the border. Theirs was a difficult job: too much territory, too few men, and too few resources to back them up. Wonderfully, one of these Wardens, Robert Carey, has left us a memoir, which is available on-line: memoirsrobertca00orregoog.

If you were attacked and you survived, you might send word to the Warden or one of his officers, who could organize a posse to pursue the raiders. By law, all able-bodied locals were supposed to turn out to help when the organizer—Warden or officer—rode by with trumpeter and a rider who carried a flaming bit of peat on his “staff” (local word for “lance”).

This was called the “hot trod” and, under its conditions, the pursuers were allowed to cross the border. Such occasions could be very dangerous, however, as those raiders would be chased back across their own territory, giving them the chance to delay or destroy those in pursuit in an ambush on familiar ground.

We were originally drawn to this part of the world and of Anglo-Scottish history because of our interest in the musical literature of the region, the so-called “border ballads”, and, in our next, “Bordering (.2 Blackmail, Battle, and Song”) we’ll talk a bit about them—and perhaps a bit more about borders and heroic behavior, as well.

Thanks as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

Smoke (No Mirrors)

22 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Economics in Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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Algonquian, Aragorn, Bag End, Baggins, Daemonologie, domestic, Gandalf, Gimli, Hernandez de Boncalo, hogsheads, Isengard, James I, Jamestown, John Rolfe, Longbottom Leaf, Matoaka, Merry and Pippin, Native Americans, Nictotiana, Philip II of Spain, pipe, plantations, Pocahontas, Popeye the Sailor, Saruman, Scouring of the Shire, Sharkey, Sherlock Holmes, Shire, smoking, Southfarthing, The First Part of Ayres of the Musicall Humours, The Hobbit, The Illiad, The Lord of the Rings, The Odyssey, Tobacco, Tobias Hume, Tolkien

As always, welcome, dear readers.

This posting takes us away from the Shire and back to it, all in a couple of pages, as well as linking itself with a recent one on Sharkey and his attempt at revenge on the Hobbits who have helped in his downfall.

We begin just after Helm’s Deep, at the moment when Gandalf and all of the major characters involved have followed the invasion route back to Isengard, only to find it in ruins and:

“And now they turned their eyes towards the archway and the ruined gates. There they saw close beside them a great rubble-heap; and suddenly they were aware of two small figures lying on it at their ease…One seemed asleep; the other, with crossed legs and arms behind his head, leaned back against a broken rock and sent from his mouth long whisps and little rings of thin blue smoke.” The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 8, “The Road to Isengard”

For Gimli, himself a smoker, that latter sight is not a surprising. For Theoden, however, not only are the Hobbits a surprise, but: “I had not heard that they spouted smoke from their mouths.”

Merry’s reply then leads us into today’s posting.

“That is not surprising…for it is an art which we have not practised for more than a few generations. It was Tobold Hornblower, of Longbottom in the Southfarthing, who first grew the true pipe-weed in his gardens, about the year 1070 according to our reckoning. How old Toby came by the plant…”

Gandalf interrupts Merry here, concluding with “Some other time would be more fitting for the history of smoking.”

But not for us.

For us, smoking, in the The Lord of the Rings, as in The Hobbit, belongs to a whole category of what we call the “domestication of the heroic”, a distinctive and important feature of JRRT’s narrative style. Earlier epics, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, certainly have their moments where combat and travel and dealing with monsters and enchantresses are not the only features of the stories. People sometimes pause to eat and drink and even sleep. JRRT goes beyond this, however, to provide what he himself might call the “homely” in his texts. By this term, we mean the ordinary and familiar, including such things as a brief inventory of the contents of Bag End, food more detailed than the “endless meat and sweet dark wine” of Homer–such as the mushrooms and bacon which Farmer Maggot offers–and Bilbo reading his letters and forgetting his pocket handkerchief. Such seemingly-trivial things give the stories—and certain of the characters within them—an extra depth and thus a deeper believability, as well as anchoring the story in something more ordinary than kings and wizards.

In fact, the center of this domestication are the Hobbits: think of Sam wanting a bit of rope or explaining taters to Gollum or that heart-breaking moment when Sam discards his pots and pans and “The clatter of his precious pans as they fell down into the dark was like a death-knell to his heart.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 3, “Mount Doom”) And, along with things like rope and conies, there is what once was called “the pleasures of the pipe”.

We live in a different world from JRRT. When he took up the pipe, in the early 20^th century, no one knew the dangers of smoking.

It was simply something men, in particular, did. After all, there was Sherlock Holmes, with his famous “three-pipe problem” (“The Red-Headed League”, The Strand Magazine, August, 1891) as a perfect model.

Thus, smoking was acceptable and, potentially, domestic: after all, although the ancient comic book and cartoon character, Popeye the Sailor (1929-1957), may hold a pipe in his mouth while battling,

it is generally something done in quiet and contemplation. Perhaps, then, for the times in which JRRT was writing, a perfect symbol of the domestic. (Hence the old expression for household comfort that someone—typically his wife–brings the owner “his pipe and slippers” when he comes home from work?)

And it appears very early in our experience of Hobbits. After all, the first time we see Bilbo, he is “standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his woolly toes”. (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

In time, we’ll see Gandalf smoking

and Strider/Aragorn, too.

In fact, we wonder if it isn’t a kind of unconscious sign that someone is a positive character—after all, as we said, Gimli smokes, too.

There is one exception, of course—and we’ll come back to that!

It should be no surprise, then, that one more positive character, Merry, is a smoker. Knowing, from the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, that he is also the author of Herblore of the Shire, among other works, it is also not surprising that he appears to be the main authority on “pipe-weed”, claiming that the Hobbits were the inventors of its consumption: “Hobbits first put it into pipes. Not even the Wizards first thought of that before we did.”

This, of course, made us think about who invented tobacco-smoking in our world—or, at least, in the English-speaking Western Hemisphere. (Although we are glad to point out that, as early as 1559, Philip II of Spain ordered Hernandez de Boncalo to bring back tobacco seeds from the New World to plant in Spain.)

Merry says of the plant (which he correctly identifies with our genus Nicotiana):

“…observations that I have made on my own many journeys south have convinced me that the weed itself is not native to our parts of the world, but came northward from the lower Anduin, whither it was, I suspect, originally brought over Sea by the Men of Westernesse. It grows abundantly in Gondor, and there is richer and larger than in the North, where it is never found wild, and flourishes only in warm sheltered places like Longbottom.”

In our world—that is, in the Americas– Native Americans first cultivated tobacco—as can be seen in this engraved version of John White’s 1580s drawing of the Algonquian village of Secoton by Theodor de Bry for the 1590 second edition of Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia.

At the top, center, is a tobacco field, with stylized plants, which, up close, might look like this:

Native Americans appear to have used tobacco—and its smoke—primarily for religious and political ceremonies, rather than for recreation.

This soon changed, however, when a member of the newly-established (1607) colony of Jamestown, John Rolfe, in what would become the US state of Virginia,

saw the commercial possibilities and began to cultivate tobacco for export.

Although John Rolfe is known to those interested in early English colonization, his wife is much more famous. She was Matoaka, called Pocahontas as a nickname (it means something like “playful/lively”), the 400^th anniversary of whose funeral is the day of this writing, 21 March (although it will be posted tomorrow, the 22^nd).

Tobacco was already known in England,

had become a sort of craze,

and even inspired at least one pop song, Tobias Hume’s “Tobacco”, from his The First Part of Ayres of the Musicall Humours (1605). Hume was a big fan of the lyra viol (a member of the string bass family).

image16lyraviol

(We include here a link so that you can hear the song sung and accompanied by his favorite instrument. Oh—and it’s sung in the pronunciation of the early 17^th century, so be prepared for some differences in sound.)

Thus, Rolfe’s exploitation was a good business investment, even though tobacco quickly ran afoul of the British government, in the form of the new king, James I,

image17james1

who had already published an attack on smoking in 1604.

image18counterblast

James I had opinions on numerous subjects, including witches, about whom he had published a book, Daemonologie, in 1597.

M0014280 James I: Daemonologie, in forme of a dialogue. Title page.

His attack on tobacco—although more sensible than believing in witches—didn’t stop it from becoming the major Virginia crop, however—as this roadside sign points out.

Virginia farmers planted huge fields of tobacco,

cultivated it (a major use of slave labor, like the sugar plantations of the Caribbean),

cut and dried it,

packed it into huge barrels, called hogsheads,

dragged those hogsheads to a port,

and shipped those hogsheads to England

where smokers enjoyed it.

We don’t know the methods used in the Southfarthing, but, looking at tobacco around the world in our world, the main difference seems to be in the curing (drying) technique used. We can imagine, then, that, when Merry talks about “pipe-weed” and its cultivation, if we visited the southern part of the Shire, we would see familiar sights—except, perhaps, for those hogheads. The stuff which Merry is smoking came from “two small barrels, washed up out of some cellar or store-house…When we opened them, we found they were filled with this: as fine a pipe-weed as you could wish for, and quite unspoilt.” (The Two Towers, Chapter Nine, “Flotsam and Jetsam”)

Gimli admires the quality and Merry says, “My dear Gimli, it is Longbottom Leaf! There were the Hornblower brandmarks on the barrels, as plain as plain. How it came here, I can’t imagine. For Saruman’s private use, I fancy.”

This brings us back to the final smoker and one exception to our fanciful rule that, in Tolkien, if you smoke, you’re a positive character: Saruman.

It’s hard to think of Saruman as indulging in the domestic. As Treebeard says of him: “He has a mind of metal and wheels” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”). And yet, although he has lost his position as head of the White Council, and has lost Isengard, as well, as Gandalf says of him, “I fancy he could do some mischief still in a small mean way.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 6, “Many Partings”). Thus, what better small, mean way than to attack that very domesticity which is embodied in the Hobbits and their Shire? As Sharkey, he does so, destroying the Shire by cutting down trees, knocking or burning down houses, replacing water mills with steam, and turning a nearly a-political place into a little fascist state. And, perhaps, as a last straw, he attacks one last small comfort, saying to Merry, as he keeps his tobacco pouch:

“Well, it will serve you right when you come home, if you find things less good in the Southfarthing than you would like. Long may your land be short of leaf!” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 6, “Many Partings”)

If so, perhaps there is a certain horrible irony, then, that, when Saruman is murdered, he is last seen as “a grey mist…rising slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire”. (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Shire Portrait (5b): Hostile Takeover

15 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Economics in Middle-earth, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, Villains

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Baggins, Chief, Der Fuehrer, Gestapo, Hitler, Lotho, SA, Sackville-Bagginses, Saruman, Sharkey, Shire, Shirriffs, Southfarthing, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Scouring of the Shire, Tolkien

Welcome, dear readers, to the second part of our last (for the moment?) posting on the Shire. This is actually a two-part posting and is devoted to the takeover of the Shire by “Sharkey” and his followers and how it might have happened, based upon evidence from the texts of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

We decided upon a two-part posting because we saw the takeover as a two-step process. Initially, we believe that Saruman looked for someone within the Shire to act as his agent there and, as a local agent, both to foment the kind of discontent which would provoke a demand for change, and to act as the leader of that change.

Because the Shire had so little government and most problems were dealt with within families, we wondered if that discontent wouldn’t begin as something Shire-wide, but be found within one or more families, instead.

With this in mind, we immediately thought of the Sackville-Bagginses. From the final chapter of The Hobbit, it was clear that the S-Bs (as they’re called) had grievances against their cousins, the Bagginses, mostly because they wanted Bag End and its contents.

How this led to leaguing with Saruman is not explained, but merely suggested, by Pippin, who says, of reported disturbance in the Southfarthing:

“ ‘Whatever it is…Lotho will be at the bottom of it: you can be sure of that.” The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 7, “Homeward Bound”

This is then confirmed when the hobbits reach the bridge over the Brandywine and one of the hobbit guards (Hob Hayward), mentions “the Chief…up at Bag End.”

Frodo, who has sold his house at Bag End (see The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 3, “Three is Company”) to the S-Bs, immediately asks Hob, “ ‘Chief? Chief? Do you mean Mr. Lotho?’ said Frodo.” The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”

Otho and Lobelia had been Bilbo’s enemies long ago, but, whereas Lobelia is still alive, Otho is long dead and Lotho (and yes, the word “loathe” must lie just below the surface here, though this is probably not his name in the Common Tongue, just as Pippin’s name isn’t Pippin), his son, has somehow become not the Mayor of the Shire (who is actually Will Whitfoot), but the much vaguer (and more menacing) “the Chief”. (We also note that “Mr. Lotho” is a courtesy title and one for established land-owners, really, and not for Lotho.)

The family theme is underlined when Hob replies that “we have to say ‘the Chief’ nowadays” and Frodo says, in turn:

“ ‘Do you indeed!’ said Frodo. ‘Well, I am glad he has dropped the Baggins at any rate. But it is evidently high time that the family dealt with him and put him in his place.’ ”

If Frodo’s remark suggests the familial aspect of justice in the Shire, the reply of an anonymous hobbit to it suggests the second or external step of the takeover:

“A hush fell on the hobbits beyond the gate. ‘It won’t do no good talking that way,’ said one. ‘He’ll get to hear of it. And if you make so much noise, you’ll wake the Chief’s Big Man.’ ”

As JRRT began The Lord of the Rings in 1937, just four years after the Nazis took control of Germany, “The Chief” surely has echoes of “Der Fuehrer”, which simply means “The Leader”.

In which case, should we associate the threat of “the Chief’s Big Man” with everything from the SA

to the Gestapo?

Merry, at least, certainly makes a connection with something which Butterbur had said earlier:

“It all comes of those newcomers and gangrels that began coming up the Greenway last year, as you may remember; but more came later. Some were just poor bodies running away from trouble; but most were bad men, full o’ thievery and mischief.” The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 7, “Homeward Bound”

Answering the anonymous voice, Merry says:

“If you mean that your precious Chief has been hiring ruffians out of the wild, then we’ve not come back too soon!”

When the Big Man appears, Merry’s conclusion is confirmed: it’s Bill Ferny, who, Butterbur believes, who had been involved in a minor battle in Bree, in which five hobbits had been killed:

“ ‘And Harry Goatleaf that used to be on the West-gate, and that Bill Ferny, they came in on the strangers’ side, and they’ve gone off with them; and it’s my belief they let them in. On the night of the fight I mean.’ “

If some of these “Big Men” were criminal drifters from the east, almost randomly recruited, there were others who were sent.

“ ‘It all began with Pimple, as we call him,’ said Farmer Cotton; ‘and it began as soon as you’d gone off, Mr. Frodo. He’d funny ideas, had Pimple. Seems he wanted to own everything himself, and then order other folk about. It soon came out that he already did own a sight more than was good for him; and he was always grabbing more, though where he got the money was a mystery: mills and malt-houses and inns, and farms, and leaf-plantations. He’d already bought Sandyman’s mill before he came to Bag End, seemingly.

Of course he started with a lot of property in the Southfarthing which he had from his dad; and it seems he’d been selling a lot o’ the best leaf, and sending it away quietly for a year or two. But at the end o’ last year he began sending away loads of stuff, not only leaf. Things began to get short, and winter coming on, too. Folk got angry, but he had an answer. A lot of Men, ruffians mostly, came with great wagons, some to carry off the goods south-away, and others to stay. And more came. And before we knew where we were they were planted here and there all over the Shire, and were felling trees and digging and building themselves sheds and houses just as they liked…”

There is a bit more to add to this. The “Big Men” were not alone. As in our own historical world of Nazi occupiers, there were those willing to collaborate, as Robin Smallburrow tells Sam:

“There’s hundreds of Shirriffs all told, and they want more, with all these new rules. Most of them are in it against their will, but not all. Even in the Shire there are some as like minding other folk’s business and talking big. And there’s worse than that: there’s a few as do spy-work for the Chief and his Men.”

With Farmer Cotton’s narrative, however, the two steps come together: the local was, indeed, as Pippin has suspected, Lotho. The external was a combination of opportunists, like Bill Ferny, and agents dispatched from an unnamed southern source, but we know that it was “Sharkey” who sent them, just as we know that “Sharkey” was Saruman, who was still capable of mischief—but not “in a small mean way”.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Shire Portrait (5a): Hostile Takeover

08 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Economics in Middle-earth, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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A Long-Expected Party, auction, Bag End, Baggins, Barliman Butterbur, Galadriel, Government, Isengard, Longbottom Leaf, Luke Skywalker, Merry and Pippin, Mirror of Galadriel, Pipeweed, Sackville-Bagginses, Sam Gamgee, Saruman, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, The Scouring of the Shire, The Shire, Tolkien, Yoda

As always, dear readers, welcome!

This is, we think, the last in our Shire Portrait series (although a 2-parter)—at least for the moment. In it, we intend to consider just how the Shire fell into the hands of “Sharkey” and his “boys”.

The Ring destroyed and the King returned, Gandalf, the Hobbits, and a party of Elves are traveling back toward Rivendell and beyond when they come upon Saruman and Grima, now no more than Saruman’s slave.

It is not a happy meeting, as can be imagined. When offered help, Saruman replies:

“All my hopes are ruined, but I would not share yours. If you have any…You have doomed yourselves, and you know it. And it will afford me some comfort as I wander to think that you pulled down your own house when you destroyed mine.” The Return of the King, Book 6, Chapter 6, “Many Partings”

In such a mood, it can be imagined how he treats the Hobbits—even when Merry offers him pipe-weed, which he does while commenting, less than tactfully, on its origin:

“ ‘You are welcome to it; it came from the flotsam of Isengard.’

‘Mine, mine, yes and dearly bought!’ cried Saruman, clutching at the pouch. ‘This is only a repayment in token; for you took more, I’ll be bound. Still, a beggar must be grateful, if a thief returns him even a morsel of his own. Well, it will serve you right when you come home, if you find things less good in the Southfarthing than you would like. Long may your land be short of leaf!’”

Saruman’s remark—a curse, really—resonates especially with Sam.

“’Ah!’ said Sam. ‘And bought he said. How, I wonder? And I didn’t like the sound of what he said about the Southfarthing. It’s time we got back.’” The Return of the King, Book 6, Chapter 6, “Many Partings”

This is a natural reaction on Sam’s part because of what he had seen in Galadriel’s mirror, we presume.

“’Hi!’ cried Sam in an outraged voice. ‘There’s that Ted Sandyman a-cutting down trees as he shouldn’t. They didn’t ought to be felled: it’s that avenue beyond the Mill that shades the road to Bywater…

But now Sam noticed that the Old Mill had vanished, and a large red-brick building was being put up where it stood. Lots of folk were busily at work. There was a tall red chimney nearby. Black smoke seemed to cloud the surface of the Mirror…

‘I can’t stay here,’ he said wildly. ‘I must go home. They’ve dug up Bagshot Row, and there’s the poor old Gaffer going down the Hill with his bits of things on a barrow…” The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter VII, “The Mirror of Galadriel”

At the time, Galadriel had told him

“’You cannot go home alone,’ said the Lady. ‘You did not wish to go home without your master before you looked in the Mirror, and yet you knew that evil things might well be happening in the Shire. Remember that the Mirror shows many things, and not all have yet come to pass. Some never come to be, unless those that behold the visions turn aside from their path to prevent them. The Mirror is dangerous as a guide to deeds.” The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter VII, “The Mirror of Galadriel”

[A footnote: suddenly, we are reminded of that scene on Dagobah in Star Wars V, when Luke has had a vision and immediately wants to rush off to Bespin.

“Luke: I saw—I saw a city in the clouds.

Yoda: [nods] Friends you have there.

Luke: They were in pain…

Yoda: It is the future you see.

Luke: The future?

[pause]

Luke: Will they die?

Yoda: [closes his eyes for a moment] Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.

Luke: I’ve got to go to them.

Yoda: Decide you must, how to serve them best. If you leave now, help them you could; but you would destroy all for which they have fought, and suffered.” The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

As—using various websites—we provide links here—we can see that an imitation of the opening of the Hobbit—Bilbo and Gandalf meeting—appears in an early script of Star Wars IV, I think that the scene at Galadriel’s Mirror was somewhere back in G. Lucas’ wonderfully fertile brain—and, yes, we are big fans.]

“Secrets of the ‘Star Wars’ Drafts”

Was George Lucas Inspired by Tolkien?

Star Wars Origins: The Lord of the Rings

At this point, we know from two sources that Saruman has had commercial dealings with the Southfarthing.

First, of course, we’ve just seen it confirmed by Saruman’s response to Merry. Second is that scene at Isengard, where Gandalf, Theoden, Eomer, and Aragorn, travel with an escort and find there Merry and Pippin, who tell them of their discovery of two small casks:

“ ‘My dear Gimli, it is Longbottom Leaf! There were the Hornblower brandmarks on the barrels, as plain as plain. How it came here, I can’t imagine.” The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 9, “Flotsam and Jetsam”

Knowing, however, of Saruman’s increasing interest in the Shire, we can imagine that one of his agents, active in the Southfarthing, had acquired it for him. As the Appendix B, “The Tale of Years” tells us, under TA2953:

[Saruman] notes his [Gandalf’s] interest in the Shire. He soon begins to keep agents in Bree and the Southfarthing.” (page 1089 in Appendix B)

Spying was clearly only the beginning for Saruman, however. The actual evidence for his eventual take-over is scattered throughout The Lord of the Rings, but we believe that it can be pieced together to provide a picture of how it must have been done. It was a two-step process.

First, he appears to have gained knowledge of internal dissatisfaction within the Shire. Because there is really nothing political in the Shire–as readers will know from the first posting in this series, there is virtually no government—this unrest was domestic—as is said in the Prologue, “Families for the most part managed their own affairs.”

In the case of Bilbo and Frodo, the dissatisfied were the Sackville-Bagginses. We first met them in the last chapter of The Hobbit, where they were described as “Bilbo’s cousins” and were shown as being actively involved in the auction of the “effects of the late Bilbo Baggins Esquire”—as well as in the disappearance of some merchandise not auctioned off:

“Many of his silver spoons mysteriously disappeared and were never accounted for. Personally he suspected the Sackville-Bagginses. On their side they never admitted that the returned Baggins was genuine and they were not on friendly terms with Bilbo ever after.” The Hobbit, Chapter 19, “The Last Stage”

It was one more blow to the Sackville-Bagginses when Bilbo rescued the now-orphaned Frodo from “those queer Bucklanders” and brought him to live at Bag End, as Gaffer Gamgee related in The Ivy Bush:

“ ‘But I reckon it was a nasty knock for those Sackville-Bagginses. They thought they were going to get Bag End, that time he went off and was thought to be dead. And then he comes back and orders them off; and he goes on living and living, and never looking a day older, bless him! And suddenly he produces an heir, and has all the papers made out proper. The Sackville-Bagginses won’t never see the inside of Bag End now, or it is to be hoped not.’ “ The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”

Bad blood, then, on several counts—and, for Saruman, looking for a way in, a great opportunity.

Bilbo might have suspected them of spoon-pilfering, but his was a more generous nature, however, and he even invited them to his and Frodo’s joint birthday party.

“The Sackville-Bagginses were not forgotten. Otho and his wife Lobelia were present. They disliked Bilbo and detested Frodo, but so magnificent was the invitation card, written in golden ink, that they had felt it impossible to refuse…” The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”

On the other hand, Bilbo does not please them when he announces that Frodo is coming into “his inheritance”—

“The Sackville-Bagginses scowled, and wondered what was meant by ‘coming into his inheritance’ “ and, when Bilbo makes his startling disappearance, they “departed in wrath”. (quotations from Chapter One).

And yet they didn’t quite depart. It seems they have only stepped away from the party, only to return to cause trouble, demanding to see Bilbo’s will.

“Otho would have been Bilbo’s heir, but for the adoption of Frodo. He read the will carefully and snorted. It was, unfortunately, very clear and correct…” The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”

Otho “snapped his fingers under Frodo’s nose and stumped off”, but Lobelia, his wife, remained, and Frodo later found her “still about the place, investigating nooks and corners, and tapping the floors. He escorted her firmly off the premises, after he had relieved her of several small (but rather valuable) articles that had somehow fallen inside her umbrella.” And she leaves with a kind of threat and what she believes is an insult:

“ ‘You’ll live to regret it, young fellow! Why didn’t you go too? You don’t belong here; you’re no Baggins—you—you’re a Brandybuck!’ ”

It’s never said why there is such an animus held by the Sackville-Bagginses against the Bagginses, but there is clearly something wrong with the S-Bs, from their covetousness to Lobelia’s open theft, and whatever is wrong is just what Saruman will find and exploit. Our next mention of them is oblique and it has to do with that pipe-weed. Merry and Pippin have been explaining how they had come to discover it at Isengard and all seems clear—

“ ‘All except one thing,’ said Aragorn: ‘leaf from the Southfarthing in Isengard. The more I consider it, the more curious I find it. I have never been in Isengard, but I have journeyed in this land, and I know well the empty countries that lie between Rohan and the Shire. Neither goods nor folk have passed that way for many a long year, not openly. Saruman had secret dealings with someone in the Shire, I guess. Wormtongues may be found in other houses than King Theoden’s…” The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 9, “Flotsam and Jetsam

With that faint foreboding, we hear no more until Gandalf and the Hobbits are once more leaving Bree and Butterbur says, almost in passing:

“ ‘I should have warned you before that all’s not well in the Shire neither, if what we hear is true. Funny goings on, they say.’ “ The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 7, “Homeward Bound”

With Butterbur’s words in their ears, the Hobbits ride out and conversation begins:

“ ‘I wonder what old Barliman was hinting at,’ said Frodo.

‘I can guess some of it,’ said Sam gloomily. ‘What I saw in the Mirror: trees cut down and all, and my old gaffer turned out of the Row. I ought to have hurried back quicker.’

‘And something’s wrong with the Southfarthing evidently,’ said Merry. ‘There’s a general shortage of pipe-weed.’

‘Whatever it is,’ said Pippin, ‘Lotho will be at the bottom of it: you can be sure of that.’”

Here again, after Aragorn’s remark long before, we see that pipe-weed turn up—and associated somehow with a Sackville-Baggins. Butterbur has already replied to Gandalf’s request for it that “That’s the one thing that we’re short of, seeing how we’ve only got what we grow ourselves, and that’s not enough. There’s none to be had from the Shire these days.”

It’s never explained why Pippin makes the connection with Lotho at this point—was the bad blood between the Bagginses and the Sackville-Bagginses part of a darker picture of the S-Bs? This seems more than possible when Gandalf adds to Pippin’s remark:

“ ‘Deep in, but not at the bottom,’ said Gandalf. ‘You have forgotten Saruman. He began to take an interest in the Shire before Mordor did.’”

And now we begin to see a potential bigger pattern: Saruman-an S-B-Shire and, with it, the second step in the take-over of the Shire, that from outside. But that’s for Shire Portrait 5b: “Hostile Take-Over.2”, next time.

Until then, thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

Shire Portrait (4): On the March

01 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Economics in Middle-earth, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

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ancient Chinese, borders, Buckland, Germanic tribes, Great Wall, Hadrian's Wall, hawthorns, High Hay, Hobbits, Marches, Offa's Dyke, Picts, Pyrenees, Rio Grande, Roman Empire, Shire, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, US-Canada Border, Westmarch

Welcome once more, dear readers.

Today’s posting continues our writing on the Shire, being the last in the geographic series, as we might call it, of which the earlier are:

In this posting, we want to look at the East March and the West March of the Shire.

JRRT doesn’t give us much to go on, there being only a single reference in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings to these:

“Outside the Farthings were the East and West Marches: the Buckland…and the Westmarch added to the Shire in S.R. 1452.”

“March” or “mark”, is related, in English, to margin, “the edge of something” and means a borderland. A border can be a natural feature, like the Pyrenees which (now) separate France and Spain.

Or a river, such as the Rio Grande, between much of the US and Mexico.

It can be simply a concept, such as much of the border between the US and Canada.

The ancient Chinese marked the border between their world and that of the pastoral nomads to the north

with the Great Wall.

The Romans set up two walls in Britain, both (in part?—there’s always scholarly argument over such things) to block the northern tribes of Picts from central and southern Britain.

7antonwallcallendar 8hadwall 9picts

And this was only part of a much bigger defensive system: the Romans also had an extensive network of ditches, walls, watch towers, and forts from the mouth of the Rhine southeast across western Germany and beyond to keep out the Germanic tribes who lived, often, just beyond.

In the centuries after the decay of Roman control, the locals in Britain built several ditch and wall barriers, most notably at Offa’s Dyke, which seems to mark a section of the border between England and Wales.

In the case of Tolkien’s marches, however, there are neither walls nor works, except, we suppose, if we include the High Hay, a dense hedge which separates the Old Forest from Buckland:

“Their land was originally unprotected from the East; but on that side they had built a hedge: the High Hay. It had been planted many generations ago, and was now thick and tall, for it was constantly tended. It ran all the way from Brandywine Bridge, in a big loop curving away from the river, to Haysend…well over twenty miles from end to end.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 1, Chapter 5, “A Conspiracy Unmasked”)

So far, we have been unable to discover an illustration of this, but we guess that the Hay may have been a hawthorn hedge, as:

hawthorns—as you might guess—have thorns and can be trained to grow densely
they can grow up to about 50 feet (15 metres) tall

14hawspine 15hawhedge

As the old word “hay” means a hedge– as does the “haw” in hawthorn–we offer this to our readers as a possibility.

A hawthorn hedge might keep out marauding beasts, but it’s hardly the equivalent of Hadrian’s Wall or the Great Wall, and the West March doesn’t appear to have any fortification at all, underscoring the nearly-complete defenselessness of the Shire, as well as the generally-peaceable nature of the Hobbits. As JRRT writes in the prologue:

“At no time had Hobbits of any kind been warlike, and they had never fought among themselves…So, though there was some store of weapons in the Shire, these were used mostly as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving.”

As a consequence:

“…they heeded less and less the world outside where dark things moved, until they came to think that peace and plenty were the rule in Middle-earth and the right of all sensible folk.”

We shall see in our next posting what happens when some of those “dark things” move—into the Shire.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Monthly Archives: March 2017

Bordering (.1: The Landscape)

Smoke (No Mirrors)

Shire Portrait (5b): Hostile Takeover

Shire Portrait (5a): Hostile Takeover

Shire Portrait (4): On the March